As a kid, I saw all the episodes of the original Star Trek. Then I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation for all seven seasons, and saw all the movies. I didn't follow Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise at all, and recently decided to accquire and view the entire run of Enterprise. That series, for the non-fans out there, was supposed to take place between our time and that of Kirk's. I'd heard bad stuff about the first season, and also heard that it basically crapped all over the continuity of the Star Trek universe. Now I'm in the middle of the four and final season, and I gotta say, the show started not so great and turned in to a real winner. My limited research gives me the idea that it got good when Brannon Braga stopped running the show. He's the guy responsible for Star Trek: Nemesis, the most recent in the movie series and perhaps the biggest piece of shit ever put on film. From what I can tell, that man is almost single-handedly responsible for destroying the franchise.

It's just too bad Enterprise only got good after most everyone gave on it. Now there's a decent chance there will never be another Star Trek movie or TV series.

I think the saddest part of watching the series is that the exploration of space by humanity will probably not resemble Star Trek in any way whatsoever. My recent fascination with the concept of the Vingean singularity has convinced me that there is *probably* not any other intelligent life in our galaxy, at least. If there was, surely they would have developed sufficient technology that we would have seen sign of them somewhere with all our telescopes. Think about it. From the earliest signs of "intelligence" in humans to the present has been... Well I have no clue, but let's just say 1 million years. The universe is something 16 billion years old. It's too farfetched to believe that the universe will spawn lots of intelligent races and we just happen to be first. With only a million years needed to get from no real intelligence to singularity (which should come to us in 40 years or so), surely someone else in the universe would have had their million years earlier than us.

Of course there are more things in heaven and earth.... Who knows? Maybe once a race hits singularity, they evolve into something we have no way of detecting. Mayb we are first. Maybe we're at the same point as a bunch of other races, and we'll all hit the singularity at once. Maybe species tend to destroy themselves right before singularity, as humanity often seems likely to do. Or maybe most species become super-Luddites at that point of development and ban artificial intelligence like in Frank Herbert's Dune series (which had no other intelligent races other than humanity, though Herbert's 6th Dune book hinted that there might be something else in book 7, but he died before he wrote it). It sure is fun to speculate, and I sure hope we do hit singularity in my lifetime so I can live forever and see what's out there.